For a project at CIID we needed as the title say, a cheap and not terribly ugly computer-readable barcode. Yes I know Microsoft is looking at the same stuff. No, I don’t really care. I’m in design school, I don’t need to care too much. Ok, I’m joking. But only half. Why did we need these? There were a few reasons for this:
we needed something for when the code itself was around 6-8 pixels tall and 40 pixels wide
we needed something that wasn’t ugly
we needed something that was space efficient
We had a few advantages too:
all people reading these things would be using color cameras
all cameras would be attached to things with reasonable computational power
they only needed to encode a single URL
So I came with a very simple encoding scheme:
The small bar on the left encodes a few things:
the color spectrum of the cameras CCD chip
the width of each block of data
the height of each block of data
the number of rows in the code
Are there drawbacks? You bet:
Huge barcodes won’t scan well if there’s really significant color variation across them. That’s probably the biggest one.
No checksum. Also big.
It’s in color. And that’s a significant one.